A favourite pastime for some office workers is window gazing: peering through the glass, letting the mind wander to the weekend or beyond and of course studying any passers-by.

One such pedestrian piqued the interest of Southampton singer/songwriter ‘The Real Raj’.

He regularly saw a woman holding a bunch of flowers and then returning empty handed a while later.

Soon he realised she was visiting the local cemetery and this, he told me, inspired him to write the song ‘Sway’: “I put a back story to how it must have felt to be in love with someone for 40 or 50 years and to loose that person.”

I heard ‘Sway’ for the first time on Monday night in the Soul Cellar. In fact it was the last song of his set and it really touched the silent audience.

Any earlier we would have missed it as the noise from evening’s crowd was so loud that only someone with a very keen ear would have picked up the melody, let alone the words.

The Real Raj has about five hours of similar material as he pointed out: “all of my songs are about something. I write songs that touch me or someone I know.”

But there is no CD for sale, just a button badge to modestly hand out: “I feel as if I’m giving something back to people for taking a moment out of their time to say thank you for a song.”

www.myspace.com/therealraj

First published in the Daily Echo Friday 11th December 2009 ]]> http://www.xan.co.uk/wordpress/2009/12/the-real-raj-through-the-window/feed/ 0